Andrew Breitbart describes the attitude of a Hollywood dinner party thus: Convicted murderer? Has anyone optioned the rights to your story?
Avowed Marxist? Viva la revolucion!
Scientologist? Do you take Visa or Mastercard?
Syphilitic drug abuser? Let's talk!
Conservative? You should go.
In 1996 at the Republican Convention the best bit of Hollywood they could come up with was Ben Stein. Stein is really a conservative columnist, but did have a bit part in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. (Remember him as a teacher? Anyone? Anyone?)
Now there are already few well known actors who depart from the Hollywood consensus - Tom Selleck, Ron Silver, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood, and, of course, Arnie - but Breitbart announces two more surprising names.
First he gives us this quote from Robert Downey Jr: I have a really interesting political point of view, and it's not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can't. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics ever since.
And then these rather surprising facts : Angelina Jolie, a "surge" supporter who also wants to produce Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, surprised Entertainment Weekly with her answer: "Actually, we don't disagree as much as you'd think. I think people assume I'm a Democrat. But I'm registered independent and I'm still undecided. So I'm looking at McCain as well as Obama.
One learns something new every day.
 Uh oh. Trouble in New York this week. As Sex and the City fever swept Manhattan, one fan seemed more than a little peeved.
Here's Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaking yesterday at Columbia University: By the way, I was originally supposed to have a part in Sex and the City, but my scene wound up on the cutting room floor. It turned out that they wanted more sex and less city. That's fine. Their loss.
Well put, Mr. Mayor. Of course, we might think you were even more fine with it had it not been for the fact that you've made precisely the same point three times before.
Stilettos in Central Park at dawn?
Alice Fishburn
Does Monty Python apply to everything in life?
Yes. Well, at least in the case of the US election. The only real question is why it took the human race so long to think up this Clinton parody?
(Hat Tip: Ben Smith)
If you've been reading the stories about Dith Pran you may be wondering what happened to the man whose face you associate with that name. What happened to Killing Fields actor Haing Ngor?
This, I am afraid, is the answer.
 Reflecting on all that is wrong with the world I have decided that one of the problems is that too few people have seen Midnight Run with Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin.
I think that failure is a more convincing explanation of rising rates of depression than that provided by Oliver James.
And if you have seen it I make only this point. If I were your accountant I'd have to advise you against opening a restaurant.
I'm just saying if I were your accountant.
An important distinction has cropped up in the presidential race. Forget about policies on tax, healthcare or the war in Iraq. What really makes a good President is their taste in movies.
So, Texans and Ohioans, which of the following will get your vote?
1) The candidate who loves nothing more than warbling along to the strains of 'As Time Goes By'
2) The one who thinks that watching a Brit organise camel ambushes on the Ottoman Empire is an evening well spent
3) The candidate whose taste goes from violence to car chase and back to violence again
Match the politico to the flick at Slash Film and head pollwards. Hey, whatever helps you make up your mind.
Alice Fishburn
 I am very excited.
I have discovered that I genuinely am separated from Kevin Bacon by less than six degrees.*
I work with Alice Fishburn (one degree of separation) who had a flatmate (two degrees) who has a cousin (three degrees) who is married, married I tell you, to Kevin Bacon (four degrees).
So there you go.
Can anyone reading this blog do better? Or can you give me someone as distinguished as Mr Bacon to whom you are linked by six or fewer jumps?
(* The idea of six degrees of separation comes from the "small world" experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Milgram sent several packages to 160 random people living in Omaha, Nebraska, asking them to forward the package to a friend or acquaintance who they thought would bring the package closer to a set final individual, a stockbroker from Boston, Massachusetts.
He found that the majority of packages arrived within five or six steps. The result is sometimes questioned because those packages that never arrived were simply eliminated from the data set.
Nevertheless the phrase "six degrees of separation" stuck. In the early 1990s it became a college bar game to link any given actor or actress to Kevin Bacon via films in which they have acted, in less than six steps.
Take Ronald Reagan. He was in The Young Doctors (1961) with Eddie Albert. Albert was in The Big Picture (1989). So Reagan's Bacon number is 2.)
Now online for the first time, the unmissable, sublime train chase scene from Wallace and Gromit.
Bizarre, but intriguing story in New York Times: Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like The Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
Read more here.
 James Bond's membership in the ChipOx club is in danger of being revoked due to irritating confusion about where he went to University.
Casino Royale's official movie website gives the following information in his CV: Lineage:
Born: Glencoe, Scotland
Education: Fettes, London School of Economics
Education: Until age 11, J. Bond was educated in Switzerland and German, where his father was stationed as a Vickers executive. After the death of his parents, he was privately tutored by his aunt and guardian, Miss Charmain Bon (deceased) of Pett Bottom, Kent.
11-13: Eton (expelled, as the record notes, for repeated curfew violations and "trouble" with one of the maids.)
13-17: Fettes: Won numerous athletic competitions. Twice boxed for the school as a lightweight. Formed the first intermural judo league for the public school circuit.
17-31: Royal Navy
30 - Present: MI6
Then there is Ian Fleming’s book You Only Live Twice.
When 007 was believed to be dead, M sent an death notice to The Times. Fleming doesn't mention Bond's university education at all, in fact suggesting that it's either top secret or he just joined the MoD straight away.
Here's the passage from Chapter 21: ...he passed satisfactorily into Eton, for which College he had been entered at his birth by his father. It must be admitted that his career at Eton was brief and undistinguished and, after only two halves, as a result, it pains me to record, of some alleged trouble with one of the boys' maids, his aunt was requested to remove him. She managed to obtain his transfer to Fettes, his father's old school…
...By the time he left... it was 1941 and, by claiming an age of nineteen and with the help of an old Vickers colleague of his father, he entered a branch of what was subsequently to become the Ministry of Defence. To serve the confidential nature of his duties, he was accorded the rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the R.N.V.R., and it is a measure of the satisfaction his services gave to his superiors that he ended the war with the rank of Commander.
So did he even go to university?
Bond's Wikipedia entry says yes, but the evidence on his university attendance seems contradictory: Per John Pearson's Authorised Biography and an allusion by Fleming in From Russia with Love, Bond also briefly attended the University of Geneva. With the exception of Fettes, Bond's attendance at these schools parallels Fleming's own life.
The film version of You Only Live Twice asserts he is a graduate with a degree in Oriental languages from Cambridge University. He also attends (presumably at some point) Oxford to study Danish in Tomorrow Never Dies, although in the film he's not there to study at all.
So maybe Vesper Lynd was wrong all along.
Maybe 007's “issues” aren’t the result of being humiliatingly bumped by the younger son of a Viscount during an election to the Rafia.
 Tim Hames, Clive Davis, Chris Dillow and now... James Bond.
Thanks to the often worthwhile PooterGeek, I discover that 007 is a member of the ChipOx club (click here to view the entry requirements). I have tracked down the full Casino Royale script in which Vesper Lynd encapsulates the spy thus: By the cut of your suit you went to Oxford or wherever and actually think human beings dress like that. But you wear it with such disdain that my guess is you didn't come from money and all your school chums rubbed that in your face every day, which means you were at that school by the grace of someone else's charity, hence the chip on your shoulder.
All of which leaves Bond with a big problem in next year's London Mayoral election. He can't vote for Boris given his ChipOx membership. But he can hardly vote for Ken Livingstone, given their differences over the cold war and all. And somehow I don't think Brian Paddick is Bond's kind of law enforcer.
Maybe he should run himself.
UPDATE: James Bond's membership in the ChipOx club is in doubt. Click here to see why.
Forget ID cards, they are so yesterday. Der Spiegel Online reports: A new weapon has been found in the global war on terror. Amid all the modern equipment and techniques such as computer networks, digital data profiling and the planned online access to PCs, the age-old method of scent analysis is enjoying a revival.
The Stasi secret police used scent gathering in Communist East Germany, collecting smells in empty jam jars and storing them. The method has reminded Germans of that failed regime of snoopers, and was highlighted in the recent Oscar-winning film "The Lives of Others" about a Stasi surveillance officer.
Let's see, they need an officer who can smell something bad even when no one else can detect it.
Got John Yates's phone number anyone?
(Hat Tip: Bruce Schneier)
Here's a contender for Top 10 Stupid Film Ideas of our Time - a docudrama on President Ahmadinejad. That'll pack 'em over the Summer to be sure.
It is being reported in Iran that Oliver 'JFK' Stone has written to the President seeking permission to make a film of his life. Apparently it's been turned down: Mehdi Kalhor, the Iranian President’s media advisor, stated that Stone is “part of the Great Satan.”
This can't be true can it?
Tom Gross comments: Stone may go ahead in any case. But he has already made a film called Natural Born Killers, so he will have to think of another title
What is the best movie one-liner? Slate suggests that Die Hard's "Yippee Ki Yay Motherf**ker" is a candidate. An odd choice.
They then list some one-liners from action movies (the orginal post contains the links): Many one-liners are bad, if treasured, puns (Arnold put his stamp on "You're fired" long before Donald did). Others display a wit that we might grudgingly concede ("Barbeque, huh? How do you like your ribs?"). The one-liner is also remarkably versatile. It spans the grandiose ("I'm going to show you God does exist"; "I'm your worst nightmare") to the minimalist ("Get off my plane"; "Whoah"). It ranges from the functional ("Dead or alive, you're coming with me") to the iconic ("Go ahead … make my day"). And while some are uninspired ("It's time to die"), others are absurd ("I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass—and I'm all out of bubble gum"), self-referential ("No sequel for you"), and sardonic ("Go ahead … I don't shop here").
I particularly like "No sequel for you".
What, though, about other movies.
I like "I'll have what she's having" and "You stupid fool, the fall'll probably kill you."
What about you?
Why the Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister was so upset about the Rushdie knighthood is beyond me. After all, as this Pakistani news report shows, The Queen was bold in also honouring a Palestinian in her Birthday Honours list.
The report says: Peter Sallis, the voice of Wallace, the Palestine man in the Wallace and Gromit films, has been appointed an OBE for services to drama
Hmm. Our colleague and spotter-in-chief Hugo Rifkind, says: I think they mean "plasticine". Not exactly a freudian slip, but something pretty close.
Murad Ahmed
 Iain Dale did not enjoy Borat, and for a creditable reason:
Some of the slapstick moments were worth a titter but the jewish scenes were a disgrace. There is enough anti-semitism in the world at the moment without providing the excuse for more. I do realise it is meant to be a comedy, but it really wasn't funny. Discuss.
Creditable, as I say, but not a view I share.
There has been a debate about this among Jews, with the US anti-defamation league attacking Sacha Baron Cohen. But I think (admittedly unscientifically, I haven't got a poll to hand) that the vast majority share my view. Borat is a vicious satire on anti-semitism.
I think East Europeans might have cause to be upset, but most Jews are laughing. Admittedly a little uncomfortably, since Borat's views are too close to those truly held by others for complete comfort, but laughing nevertheless.
 Following his Oscar win last night, Al Gore's supporters are over excited. They are urging him to enter the race for the Presidency.
Here are five Oscars in wait for the former Vice-President should he follow this advice: Worst Mistake Made by a Supporting Actor: Even with the support of the Clintons, Gore lost. This time the Clintonistas will be out to get him. They are a pretty scary bunch.
Best Foreign Language Film: Is there anything in Gore's new career that suggests he now speaks the language of Middle America? I'd say not. He always knew how to be a good policy wonk speaking the inconvenient truth. That's an entirely different skill.
Special Academy Award: Given to people past their sell by date when they are no longer able to win the real prize.
Best Makeup: It's his for the asking if he can repeat the bizarre claims about the internet that enlivened his last campaign
Least Original Screenplay: Failing to realise that you've lost and it's time to give up is the oldest political failing. Do his advisers really want to see him repeat a classic error?
This, right now, this is the high point of Al Gore's 2008 Presidential campaign. The crowds are cheering for more. It's the perfect moment for him to quit the race.
Here's Nora "When Harry Met Sally" Ephron reflecting on two things that have been bothering me too.
The first is "Whatever happened to the Scooter Libby trial?". The second is "When you are asked in court what you were doing at 5pm on a random day six months or more ago, how does anyone remember?".
As you may know, I am always on the lookout for great names that I can be sure are genuine, rather than urban myths.
So I was delighted to discover, reading Neal Gabler's excellent biography of the great Walt Disney, that the man responsible for many of his comic storylines was named Theodore Hee.
T.Hee. I promise you.
Daniel Finkelstein
is Chief Leader Writer of The Times and writes a weekly column. Comment Central is his rolling guide to the best opinion on the web. Click
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